UC Berkeley Press Release

Two scientists among "Scientific American 50;" six elected fellows of AAAS

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 15 November 2005

BERKELEY – Six University of California, Berkeley, faculty members were elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) this fall and will be inducted into the organization at its annual meeting in February.

In addition, two UC Berkeley faculty members are among 50 technological leaders selected for their scientific accomplishments and profiled in the December 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine.

The two "Scientific American 50" honorees are Inez Fung, professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management, and director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center; and Michael Eisen, assistant professor of molecular and cell biology. Both Fung and Eisen are scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

According to the magazine's editor-in-chief, John Rennie, "The Scientific American 50 is our annual opportunity to salute the people and organizations worldwide whose research, policy or business leadership has played a major role in bringing about the science and technology innovations that are improving the way we live and offer the greatest hope for the future."

Fung was honored as a leading climate expert whose computer modeling has shown recently that the Earth may lose its ability to absorb much of the greenhouse gas that is raising global temperatures. Eisen was lauded as a champion of the open-access movement in scientific publishing. He is one of the founders of the Public Library of Science, which publishes several free online journals.

The new UC Berkeley AAAS fellows are among 376 fellows announced earlier this month. The new fellows will receive from the association a certificate and a blue and gold rosette pin as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.

Information, computing, and communicationSuzannah E. Lewis, director of bioinformatics for the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project, a joint research group with the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

PhysicsRoger W. Falcone, professor and former chair of the physics departmentRamamoorthy Ramesh, professor of physics and of materials science and engineering

Wemmer, Lewis, Falcone and Ramesh all have appointments at LBNL. In addition, Wemmer is a faculty affiliate of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3), a joint program involving UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz.